General Stuff - Installation

There is no Problem booting Linux from an USB-Stick (mine is from Lexar).
Just plug it in and check in the BIOS in the 'Boot'-Section that the Stick
shows up and change - if necessary - the order of the devices so that it is
listed before the Harddisk.

If your USB device doesn't boot make sure you have the latest BIOS downloaded
(eg from http://www.flybook.biz/
and installed. With my original BIOS version I could boot only from one really
old USB-Stick and from an USB floppy drive (very useful for upgrading the
BIOS...).

If you have a CD/DVD-drive with USB-interface instead it is of course easier to
install the OS directly from CD/DVD and not mess around with several Linux
installations on different partitions, though it is a nice challenge and there
is much to learn.

One remark - the first and the last - regarding windows. When booting it for
the first time you get immediately to the setup routine, with horrible Sound
& Music playing. Unfortunately the volume cannot be muted or at least
decreased.
So I booted it exactly once, switched it off very quickly and then
repartitioned the harddisk.

How to install

Boot Feather-Linux or the installer of your preferred distribution. I used
Feather-Linux as an intermediate step because the driver for the IDE-Chipset
(Ali 15x3) was not included in the ramdisk of Debian Sarge (and thus the
harddisk was not detected) and I didn't want to mess around with the
driver-archives.
From Feather-Linux install knoppix to a separate partition and from there
continue following the description at
http://www.debian.org/releases/stable/i386/ch-preparing.en.html#s-linux-upgrade
(link doesn't work any more, somewhere on debian.org there will be the
necessary documentation).

Finally you have a pure clean Debian-System distributed on several partitions.